"whois -h tools at xxx.net" ?

Cool!... I'd really like to be able to do something like...
whois -h whois.ra.net 'echo + > /etc/hosts.equiv'
huh huh...
-- The Cracker
In our previous episode, Dale S. Johnson said:
>> All,
>> One of the impromptu things that turned out to be useful under the PRDB
> was the ability to put up ad-hoc tools under the whois server. Steve
> Richardson wrote a lovely server that lets you type:
>> whois -h prdb.merit.edu 'aggis 35/8'
>> to run "aggis" on "35/8", as well as doing more complicated things. The
> programs and reports are also available by other methods (ftp, www), but
> whois turns out to be nice in that you walk a naive user through it over
> the phone in a few seconds, without requiring that they bring a program
> over and install it, install perl, etc.
>> I'd like to replicate this kind of functionality for the RA, and it
> would be even nicer if we did this in a way that everyone liked so that
> it became a normal IRR feature.
>> Which leads to the following questions:
>> 1) Does this service look useful to anyone else?
>> 2) Is there a clean way to tie this into the RIPE-distribution whoisd?
> We would need to distringuish whoisd queries from the other ones that need
> to be passed to local programs. Would any the following algorithm work:
>> - Anything with a space in it ("aggis 35/8") is a special program?
> [But some queries can potentially allow spaces, no?]
> - Anything in a list of key names is a special program?
> [But then this name space can overlap with, e.g., maintainer
> or community names and cause conflicts]
> - Anything sent to a totally separate whois server (whois -h
> tools.XXXX.net) is a separate program. [Counter-intuitive;
> folks will always be making mistakes]. [Or: make it
>> finger "aggis 35/8"@finger.XXX.net
> ?]
>> (Our version looks for the first token on /usr/local/whois.bin; if it
> is there, run that as a program passing the rest of the string as
> parameters).
>> 3) Are folks willing to have the front-end of this be part of the
> standard IRR software?
>> --Dale
>
--
Laurent Joncheray, E-Mail: lpj at merit.edu
Merit Network Inc, 4251 Plymouth Rd, Suite C, Phone: +1 (313) 936 2065
Ann Arbor, MI 48105, USA Fax: +1 (313) 747 3185
"This is the end, Beautiful friend. This is the end, My only friend, the end" JM
-------- Logged at Mon Mar 27 20:57:27 MET DST 1995 ---------